Student4Life

Posts tagged: Linux

Quite a while ago I purchased Uplink (and Defcon) for Linux through the Introversion website. Uplink worked at the time (Ubuntu 8.10) but somewhere along the way Canonical removed the libgtk1.2 libraries from the Ubuntu repositories. This presents a problem when installing the game in later versions of Ubuntu.

I’m just listening to an interview at RoboAwesome with Edmund and Tommy (when their powers combine, they are Team Meat) responsible for the upcoming Super Meat Boy. It’s 1 hour 10 minutes and 10 seconds in length. Right around the 30 minute 21 second mark, Tommy says,

We're never doing Linux because that's dumb.
I don't care what anybody says, nobody plays
games on Linux.

But I do! We exist. Linux gamers exist!

This caused me to think about the state of games on Linux. I’m talking about real commercial support for games on Linux. It’s a catch-22. Simply put, I believe people don’t use Linux as their every-day desktop because there are not enough commercial games for it. Why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? And I’m talking about games that are recently released with the intent of being available for Linux on or soon after launch, not games that have been out for a year and someone decided to port it over to Linux.

Anyway, back to the question of why isn’t there a large library of commercial games available for Linux? It’s because developers feel that there aren’t enough Linux gamers.

Linux gamers say: Make games for Linux, more people will use Linux.

Developers say: I’m not going to make games for Linux because no one plays games on Linux.

Hopefully a Linux-native client of Steam can fix this. Hopefully by the end of August, 2010.

I just want to say a quick word about this week’s Midweek Madness on Steam. It features 7 indie games. Seven! And all for $2 each or $9.99 for the whole bunch.

The two most relevant to this post are two that also have Linux binaries. There’s Altitude, a real-time, side-scrolling, shoot other planes while you fly game. The other is Galcon Fusion, a real-time, top-down, take over planets and wipe out the competition game.

The cool thing these two games are doing is, you purchase the game on Steam (presumably in your Windows partition or through wine), and then register the game. The game authenticates against their respective developers’ websites and have you create an account for each. Now that you’re registered, download the Linux binary/demo and then enter your account details (username and password). You now have two great full-version games you can play natively in Linux!

These are further instructions to the Ubuntu Community documentation on Doom 3 (and Resurrection of Evil). Where those instructions deal with installing from the retail CDs which you’d be hard-pressed to find any more, my instructions are how to install from an existing Steam installation.

The Steam version of Doom 3 most likely exists within a Windows partition on your computer, but I don’t see why you couldn’t install Steam/Doom3 via Wine and copy the files over from that.